I use the expression ‘staring down the barrel of a gun’ a lot.  I don’t know why.  I’m usually not referring to anything life or death.  Just the idea that in the moment, the choice I am faced with feels intense, imminent, incredibly important.  Life changing.

This year has been an interesting year for me.  A year of growth.  A year of grief and mourning.  A year of finding out how to be me without my mother.  It has been challenging.  Rewarding.  Dark.  Hopeful.  Endless and timeless all at once.  I think I both know myself better and don’t know myself at all.  I look in the mirror sometimes and I try to find something — anything — that lets me know that I’m choosing correctly.

Nothing ever comes.  Sometimes I sleep well.  Other times I don’t.  Sometimes I struggle with MS.  Sometimes I don’t.  Sometimes things feel as though they are beginning to make sense, and in the same instant, feel overwhelming, as though I am drowning and watching myself lose grip.

I have gone on interviews.  I have summoned enthusiasm for positions I never had any interest in — directions in life that inspire nothing but the knowledge that I am doing it to get it done.  I have toyed with graduate school – I have applied.  I have wondered what the long con is … what am I working on for what result some day in the future?

Everyone dies.  Right?  If I have learned nothing this year but that, then I have at least learned that.  When I walked down Walnut Street gripping Lydia with sweaty palms, counting the steps, the painful distance of two blocks from my office to the bank … I clearly understood priorities in a way I never did before.  And now, trying to find light in darkness, trying to hear my mother’s voice in a void of silence, I very acutely understand that no amount of love, no amount of wishes or morphine or crossed fingers will change the inevitability of death.

Cancer didn’t care that I needed her.  That my father needed her.  That my brother and her identical twin needed her.  Cancer couldn’t have cared less.  Cancer does not discriminate, it does not show rhyme or reason in its actions, in it’s insidiousness.

And so, nearly three years after leaving my job I sit here, wondering what the point of it all is.  And I talk to a man about a fascinating company.  And I wonder … why?  Why should I pursue that when I really have no interest.  Well, maybe not no interest, but my interest is fleeting at best.  It is superficial.

What should I be doing for the rest of my life … that when I close my eyes for the last time, gives me peace?  And … what can I do within the confines of multiple sclerosis? Tricky question to start, I know … trickier question to answer, given the variables.

I have tried to refresh this blog … so it doesn’t look like the space I created nearly nine years ago.  So it is a new space, where I can come, and scream into the void.  Talk about the things that bring me passion.  Wonder about the big questions for which I have no answers.  I can’t promise anything … I can’t promise daily blogs, or a cohesive thought pattern.  I can’t promise a theme.  But I can promise honesty.  I can promise that when I sit here, and type furiously and with intense focus, it will be the truth of who I am in that moment.  The truth of what I believe and what I am questioning.  Because I don’t really know how to be anything better than I know how to be honest.  (That has been a theme in my recommendations … and perhaps not always in a positive way).

xox, g

Sometimes – and the timing is usually very odd — I feel so inherently like my mother’s daughter. It isn’t often. But I feel her spirit in me, I see her influence in how I live my life and make my choices.  I marvel at how who she was, and how she lived her life, molded my brain and gave me a sense of right and wrong, morality and values, what life is all about.  It becomes very clear when looking at how other people make choices, how they behave and how that is in stark contrast to how I live my own life.

She was sort of marvelous in every way.  And I don’t know how she did it.  How she always found the positive, how she always smiled.  How she contemplated information and offered sane, candid and thoroughly considered opinions about everything.  I think about how much she loved to cook, even when she couldn’t taste food anymore because the chemo had killed her taste buds and left her mouth painful and raw.  I think about her pure joy in discovering new things, or seeing a hummingbird feed in the boughs of the backyard trees.  I think about how much she knew — just, SO much.  I will never accumulate that knowledge, or be able to put it in context and use it to make arguments the way she could.  I think about how many people’s lives she not only touched, but positively influenced.  So far beyond influencing her son and daughter — influencing and helping other people’s sons and daughters, advocating for people whose voices weren’t as loud and articulate at hers, offering kindness and solace for a multitude of heartaches.  My mother was gentle, and deft and could read a room in an instant, could read the people surrounding her, and she made everyone feel heard and seen and important and wise and thoughtful … even if maybe, we weren’t.

She could have been broken.  She could have been angry at the hand life dealt her at such a young age, when her first husband was tragically killed in a drunk driving accident.  She could have harbored resentment and bitterness her entire life (and maybe she did) that such cruelty found her at the tender age of 22. But … that wasn’t the person I knew my mother to be.

My mother was married to my father for forty-five years.  They had two children and they raised us well.  We never wanted for anything, we traveled the world.  They exposed us to so many different things.  I carry all those memories with me every day.  I give my dad a hug, and kiss his scratchy cheek (he has stopped shaving every day since my mother died … I think it is his treat to himself) and I feel beyond lucky for the two people who raised me and gave me the gifts they gave me.  I am inherently my father’s daughter.  That has never been in question.  But when I see my mother’s eyes looking back at me in the mirror, or look down and see her hands typing, my heart swells with such gratitude and love … and pain that she is gone and I (and my brother) are all that is left of her.

It doesn’t matter how much time has passed since we lost her.  It doesn’t matter that time-very insensitively — marches steadfastly forward, and I have to experience things without her.  The pain is real, it is immediate, the sense of loss is one of the real-est things I’ve every grappled with.  Sometimes I need her so much I think my heart will stop beating with the squeezing pain.  I look into the nothingness, into the void, and wonder how I will possibly cope without her to tell me what to do.  How will I continue to move forward without her guidance?  It is an unanswerable question.

And it’s then that I see her in me.  That I feel her voice in my soul.  That I remember that she made me, and that the answers are there.  They just aren’t as easy to find.

Mama Bear, I am doing my best.

xox, g